


What The Panda Saw

by kapakoscheisigma



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Other, companion death of old age, unexpected companion pregnancies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-19 00:30:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 10,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2367620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kapakoscheisigma/pseuds/kapakoscheisigma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That is the dematerialization control, and that over yonder is the horizontal hold. up there is the scaner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it... sheer poetry, dear boy! Now please stop bothering me!" (The Doctor, The Time Meddler)</p><p>Hi-Fi's journey through the years in the TARDIS. Firstly in Steven's roon, then sometimes he listens from a cupboard, sometimes he watches from a shelf, sometimes theDoctor feels a companion needs a comforter. Sometimes the TARDIS brushed his mind. Once, the Doctor is is sore need of all the comfort he can find. The Doctor really needs a cuddle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Steven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asparagusmama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/gifts).



> Happy 984th birthday dear girl. I fear now I will not post it all for your birthday. It was such a simple idea that had run away with me.

He came back for me. Like he still needed me. If he hadn’t needed me I think I would have been glad to burn. I’m not sure. But he had needed me. 

And I was glad.

The first time we looked at each other it was love at first sight. I was made for love. For loving and being loved. I had been made on the blocks on the Main Dome on Pluto, in the sweatshops, by white trash descents of the Australia Famine and great Southern US Drought of the 2120s. Steven was a little boy in a Hive Block in a place I later learned used to b called England. It was his first birthday, and his eyes shone with pleasure as he ripped open the paper and first laid his eyes on me.

I was made to love a child. Steven grew. I knew he would grow out of me. One day he stopped dragging me around by my paw. Ten years after that he stopped keeping me on his bed, he had stopped hugging me long before that, and placed me on a shelf along with his space fighter and interstellar explorer craft models and his books. From there I watched him grow.

Steven studied hard. Friends came over, mostly to study. I remember a blond boy, Steven’s first kiss, and later, much later, a dark girl and far more than kisses. I remember the first time Steven got really drunk, watching him throw up, feeling the room spin with him. I remember ever cold, every sneeze, every rash; the mumps he caught before his finals. Once, humans had almost eradicated virus and hunger. Before the Daleks came.

I hate the Daleks.

Steven took a gap year. He came back for New York so angry. So angry. I had never seen him so righteously angry. He had seen so much devastation, so much cost, that years before, the Daleks had brought to that city, to the world. Southern England had been spared the rest, centre of their operation. Humans too far to be enslaved and used had been expendable.

I hate the Daleks.

So did Steven. He knew what he was going to do at last.

I sat on his shelf in his small room for two years of his training at the Academy in San Francisco. Then we were ready. He was assigned to a squadron, and I came too, no longer the favourite toy of a child or immature adolescent, but a fighter pilot’s mascot, sitting on the con.

We saw little action, and no Daleks. We patrolled the outer limits of human-space. It was boring for Steven.

Then we crashed.

I don’t know how long he stumbled, clutching me, through that forest of moving plants and fungi, all trying to eat my Steven. But finally, we saw it, The City, shining before us, high above us.

They were called Mechonoids. Designed to build and maintain The City for colonialists who never arrived. The Dalek invasion, no doubt.

I hate Daleks.

The Mechonoids required PIN and password input. My Steven tried to guess, but failed.

They fed Steven, gave him a spacious room, but still he was a prisoner. He built himself what he called an exercise frame, but it looked like a child’s climbing frame to me, one the child he had once been, growing up in an over-crowded Hive Block, would have loved to have played on. And like the child he had been, he began to talk to me again, out loud. I loved him with all my stuffing. He was so alone.

Then they came, the girl, the woman, the two men, one older and dynamic, the older one sharp eyes and some different, something other. I was sad the Mechonoids had made them prisoners too, but so happy for Steven he other humans to talk to. I love him, my Steven, but an adult man talking only to his stuffed panda, is quite mad with loneliness.

These new ones, however, would not give up. They were determined to escape.

They also brought the Daleks.

I hate the Daleks.

After two years of nothing but the two of us and calm and quiet, the routine of the Mechonoid bringing the meals, all was confusion, chaos, fire and violence.

I think this is the way of it always with Him. But Steven and I knew nothing of the Doctor in those days.

They escaped. Steven did too.

Then he came back for me. We wandered again in the carnivorous forest, having lost the Doctor and his friends. I saw a door; Steven must have done too. Then we wandered through white corridors with round glowing things in the walls. I think the smoke inhalation and the bang on the head, as well as the lack of food and water, got to my Steven. When we finally found the humans, Steven fainted.

Except, it was just one human. Barbara and Ian had stolen the Daleks’ ship and gone home. The Doctor, well he is not human, how very much not human, I found out later. And later still, how very, very human he is too.

Steven was show where to get cleaned up, where to find fresh clothes, where to shave, to bring back his lovely face. I was put on a chair. Steven laughed at the suggestion they had travelled through time as well as space. And then, wrapped in cloaks, they left me sitting on a chair.

Then she touched my mind. Gently, softly, afraid to break my small, tiny, insignificant, consciousness existing inside my fur, stuffing and thread. She shared enough with me to know we had travelled in time, and Steven would learn that too. When the tide covered her outer shell she opened the scanner, and, glassy eyes, I watched the fish.

 

Time passed. After the first time Steven was out of the TARDIS I was taken from the chair in the console room and Steven and I were given a bedroom. At first he sat me on his pillow, and for the first few nights hugged me tightly like a frightened child. Then I would lie on the pillow or fall out of bed. After a few months, he sat me on the nightstand. 

Steven came and went, having exploring the universe with Vicki and the Doctor. Often there were adventures. Sometimes Steven returned sad, sometimes mad, often overawed and over excited. The Doctor showed him so much, taught him so much.

And put him in danger. Vicki too.

Then, one day, Vicki left, and Steven hugged me all night.

Once, Steven was angry and heartbroken, sad and afraid. He, the Doctor and the new girl had been gone so long. There had been Daleks, She told me.

I hate Daleks. Daleks are evil.

Steven had fallen in love. And befriended her brother. Already, the Daleks had killed the girl who had replaced Vicki, the girl from the Ancient Times of Earth. Now the girl Steven loved had been killed. Her brother too. 

By Daleks. I hate Daleks. They are the most evil things in the Universe.

Steven had seen death before with the Doctor, but never on such a scale, never of those he loved and respected, those he travelled with.

That night he hugged me all night.

Soon Steven was angry again. Shaking with what felt like righteous anger. This time it was the Doctor he was angry with. He shouted his anger at me, it all pouring out of him like he had as a small boy after a bad day at school talking aloud to me, talking it through with himself, before he confronted the Doctor.

There had been another death. I was sad about that, but Steven was leaving the Doctor, leaving the TARDIS...

Leaving me...?

Steven came back. There came a new girl. An ignorant, common girl from the twentieth century. Once she had come poking her nose around Steven’s room, and had teased him about me. Steven took it all good-naturedly; he indulged her. He loved her, I think. Not like the other girl, the girl the Daleks killed, or the boy in his class at school or the girl from college he lost his virginity with. Ot like the occasional boys and girls out of the TARDIS, they came and went on some of the adventures, flirtations and holiday romances, brief encounters forged in the heat of battle. Steven loved this one like a daughter. My Steven was growing up, and if he had stayed in one place, in his time and space, perhaps he would have had a husband or wife of his own, children of his own, to love and indulge. For me to be loved and played with, as I was made for.

Then, on day, Steven left. He, the Doctor and Dodo left the TARDIS, but only the Doctor and Dodo returned. I was terrified. The Doctor was dangerous; he put his companions in danger. He didn’t mean to, but he fought evil, and evil kills.

She touched my mind. She saw the Doctor’s mind. Then he came into Steven’s room. Our room.

“H’m. Yes. Well. I supposed I must tidy you away. Your owner will do amazing things Hi-Fi. He will teach them to live in peace. You must be very proud of him. Yes yes. We will miss Steven terribly. A charming boy, a charming boy...”

But, as he spoke, he did not ‘tidy me away’. Instead, he made the bed, hung up the clothes, harrumphing at the ridiculous cowboy outfit Steven had chosen a few weeks before, then placed me gently on the pillow and left.

When a special toy is no longer needed, what happens? Is our time over? Steven was fully an adult, not just in charge of his own destiny, but that of two separate peoples, of an entire planet. He had learnt so much from the Doctor, grown so much, reached a potential beyond his imagining long ago as a boy in a Hive Block.

But what of me? I had heard of ‘Doll State’, which is, I supposed, like human cryonic suspension used in the first early days on extra solar planetary colonization. And of course, ‘Permanent Doll Sate’, a permanent loss of consciousness, a living death, that befall some toys. Both sound horrifying, but what is the alternate? Conscious but alone, with no one to love? Now Steven was gone – and yes Doctor, I was proud of him! – I wanted peace. Eternal Peace.


	2. Dodo

I was not alone long. Days? Weeks at the most.

One day Dodo rushed in and threw herself upon the bed and took me up, hugging me close to her face, wet with tears.

“It’s positive!” she wailed. “It’s positive! What can I do?”

I don’t know. I’m a small, stuffed panda, a creature long extinct in Steven’s time. Not in Dodo’s though, I remember her telling Steven she had seen real pandas at London Zoo.

Dodo sat up, hugging me to her stomach. It was slightly rounded and swollen.

“I wish your owner were here Hi-Fi. I miss Steven so much.”

So do I.

“I can’t talk to the Doctor. He’s an old man. And an alien. I don’t even know if his people are interested in... if they... how they make...”

I can’t really help Dodo. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

“Mind you, Steven would be so cross with me. And disappointed.”

Why, what have you done Dodo?

“But he would know what to do!”

There were more tears, many of them, a river of tears. I expect stuffed toys of girls have to mop up tears far more than I ever did with Steven, even as a toddler or an adolescent.

I wait, hugging her back with all my stuffing. I was built for love.

“I’m pregnant Hi-Fi!” she blurted out eventually. “What can I do?”

All I could think of was a small child to love and nurture all over again, a small child to actually play with me. That was what I was made for.

“The TARDIS is no place for a baby! And how could I? What could I do?”

The Doctor is a proper doctor, I thought, I’m sure he is. Isn’t he? Doesn’t the TARDIS have a medical bay? And I know the Doctor would love a baby too.

“I don’t want to have to leave somewhere I don’t understand. I will just have to hope for the TARDIS to get me back to my own time, or near to it!” Dodo said finally, and kissed me, and placed me on the pillow once more.

As if the TARDIS heard, the very next day we arrived in London in 1966 and I never saw Dodo again.


	3. Spaces in Time

The Doctor does not like being alone. He needs his young human companions, for all his bluff and grump and complaint.

So, two more arrived. She, with the shining, ironed smooth hair and heavily made-up eyes, was given Dodo’s room. He, in an ancient sailor’s uniform from Steven’s Picture-History books we pored over in bed under the covers with the torch when he was at pre and primary school, got mine.

“’Ere, what’s this then? A kid’s toy!”

And I was shoved in the bottom of the wardrobe with the shoes and a musty old blanket.

Time passed. Occasionally she brushed my mind. I slept a lot. Perhaps it is Doll State? Once, the TARDIS was all a-quiver with excitement and importance.

The Doctor has renewed. He had changed. His loom body was wearing a bit thin. He has regenerated.

I didn’t know what these things meant until after Ben and Polly had gone and the Doctor – and I felt certain that this was the Doctor for all his younger face under his heavy fringed mop of dark, straight hair, and his bow tie and frock coat – tidied up and emptied the room.

“Hi-Fi! My giddy aunt! I forgot all about you. Dear Steven.”

“Who’s Steven?” asked a Scottish voice. It belongs to a young man wearing a kilt and the floppy type of shirt from the Picture-History that meant seventeenth or eighteenth century Europe.

“A friend who travelled with me a long time ago.”

“Oh aye!”

“Not like that Jamie. I was older then.”

“You strange wee man! I don’t know what you talk about half the time!”

And they smiled at each other. Then kiss. This one was not just a companion.

The Doctor emptied the room of all of Steven and Ben’s belongings, and the man who had the room before Steven, Ian probably. Me, he put inside a high cupboard just outside the door to the console room. I could hear the hum of the TARDIS, her materializations and dematerializations, the wheeze and groan, the Doctor and Jamie’s coming and goings.

But mostly I slept. Or fell into Doll State. Whatever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These references to Doll State and Permanent Doll State are ideas borrowed from the book The Doll People by Ann M Martin and Laura Godwin


	4. Victoria

I didn’t know how much time had passed when the cupboard door was opened and I saw again the Doctor’s bright eyes in his new face, shining at me with love under his thick, heavy fringe.

“Come along Hi-Fi, you’re needed.”

The Doctor took me to the bedroom that had been Vicki’s, Dodo’s and Polly’s in its time. On the bed sat a girl in the heavy skirts and tight waist of a mid-Victorian young lady. Thank goodness for all those nights with little Steven as we looked through his Picture-History series of books!

She was but a girl though, and was crying heavily. Jamie was sat beside her, his arm about her shoulders, and he made gentle, soothing noises. As we came in Jamie looked up at the Doctor. He sat down next to the girl, the other side of her to Jamie. The bed rocked as he did so. The girl hiccupped a little.

“Oh Doctor. What must you think of me?”

“It’s only natural Victoria, you must think nothing of it.”

“Aye, weeping can be the best thing at times.”

The Doctor gently patted Victoria’s leg and laid me upon her lap.

“What is this? A toy of a Chinese panda? I’ve heard of pandas, of course.”

“This is Hi-Fi Victoria. He belonged to a very dear friend of mine. If you need him, he will be here for you my dear. You can hold him, cuddle up to him...”

“Oh Doctor! Aren’t I a little too old for toys?”

“No, not really my dear. You’ve been very brave, running the home for your father at such a young age after your mother...”

“Oh Mama! Oh Father...”

“Oh, don’t fret hen. I know things seem bleak, but you have us now.” Jamie tightened his hold upon the girl and began to stroke her long hair. He was only a little older than her, but he seemed to be trying to be so strong and adult for her.

“No, don’t cry any more Victoria. We’re here for you. I promised your father I will be here for you as long as you need me. Jamie too. We both will be.” The Doctor began to hug the girl too. Slowly, by degrees, she pulled me to her and pressed me to her chest and held me tightly, making us a sandwich between the Doctor and Jamie. Her sobs grew, and then abated, then her head grew heavy until she was asleep. Jamie stood up and laid her down while the Doctor removed her shoes and undid enough buttons at the back of her dress to loosen her corsets before covering her with a counterpane. 

“She’ll not want to wear such clothes travelling with us, will she Doctor?”

“They’re not exactly practical, are they? But Victorians are such prudes, Jamie; it might take her a while. I’ll chose her a simple girl’s dress and lay it out for her. As for you,” the Doctor suddenly turned to me, picking me up from the floor where I had fallen and tucking me into Victoria’s arms, “You little Hi-Fi, must love and nurture Victoria as you did Steven. She’s been through a lot in her little life, dear bear, and she needs a comforter. Don’t let me down –”

Of course not Doctor.

“Her mother died when she was young and she had to grow up, and now the Daleks –”

Daleks! I hate Daleks!

“- have killed her father. So you must be there for her as long as she needs you.”

Of course. Daleks are evil. Poor Victoria. You can rely on me Doctor.

I stayed with Victoria in her bed every night she was aboard the TARDIS. Slowly, she grew to wear shorter, practical dresses and skirts, but she never quite stopped being a girl of her time. She was an excellent seamstress and made me a yellow waistcoat and purple frockcoat which I wore when I sat on her pillow, and a tiny white nightshirt for sleeping in with her a nights. She also bathed me, and the last of Steven’s faint smell left me, leaving me smelling of lavender and roses.

Oh Steven! When I think of you now, I see roses. It’s not right! There were no flowers in our Hive Block, or in our patrol ship.

Victoria was such an innocent. In her Victorian mind, the Doctor was her guardian, charged by her father to look after her. She was the Doctor’s ward, and tried ever so hard to be dutiful and brave wherever and whenever she went. She loved Jamie as a big brother, and then as she grew up a little, grew a little older, perhaps not quite as a brother at all. But in her innocence, she never recognized her little stirrings for what they were. As for the Doctor and Jamie, husband and husband in all but name, she had no idea how they were a couple, how to them she was their fosterling, their daughter. They loved her fiercely. As did I. So much had been broken for Victoria.

But she was not a natural companion. One day she did not come back. The Doctor put me back in my cupboard behind the console room, explaining she had decided to settle on Earth, a hundred years after her time, with a kindly human couple, a man and a woman who would give her the normality and routine she craved, as well as love. I missed her, but not as much as Steven, but I was happy for her. She had what she needed.


	5. The spaces in-between, or Sexy keeps Hi-Fi informed

A very, very long time passed. There was fear in the TARDIS, she was running from others of her kind, she was running so hard, trying to protect her Thief, maybe even herself.

Sadness as Jamie was ripped from his husband, the very knowledge of his love for the Doctor torn away. Sadness for the latest girl too.

The anger. The Doctor had been regenerated. Forcibly regenerated. That sounded like execution to me.

More anger with suffocating frustration. She was stranded. Stuck. Cut off from the Vortex, her natural home.

Once I saw the Doctor’s new face. Bright white hair and a beaky nose. He opened my cupboard door, obviously frantically searching for something... his own memories of dematerialization, perhaps? He smiled when he saw me, tickled my stomach, and then closed the door.

I slept. Occasionally the TARDIS brushed my mind. How dare her Thief’s husband...

Jamie?

No! His husband. Another Time Lord. The Evil One.

I slept so much. Centuries passed. The door opened once again. A tall, dark haired aristocratic woman. Not human at all. A Time Lord, like the Doctor. A Time Lady. She laughed,

“Doctor! What is this?”

“H’m? What?” He had changed again. I could tell by the voice, the deep, and rich, deep brown voice. He stepped into my view. He was all dark curls and boggling eyes. His mouth split into a wide smile of mad teeth. This one reflected the inner Doctor to the ‘n’th degree, I felt. “Oh. Hi-Fi. A teddy bear. Belonged to a boy who travelled with me.”

“A human?”

“Yes. Space Fleet. Had crashed. I rescued him. He travelled with me for a while, as they do, you know?”

“An adult?”

“Some adults need comforters. My youngest...”

“You have loomlings Doctor? When?”

“When I was on Gallifrey, of course, before I left. When else?”

“I looked you up, you know? There is no record of your marriage.”

“No, there wouldn’t be. The Master... expunged all trace of himself.” The Doctor frowned, his smile fading, like the sun going behind a cloud. “He wouldn’t! No. Of course not!” He was obviously talking to himself. He pulled himself together and faked his previously genuine wide smile. “Did you not have a special toy Romana?”

“Of course. Rabbit. I put it away when I went to the Academy.”

“Rabbit eh? What a highly original name. Really? Did you? Didn’t you sob into Rabbit’s fur after they made you look into the Untempered Schism?”

Romana hesitated, “Well, perhaps...” she admitted after a while.

“My middle daughter, she had a rabbit toy. Now, my eldest, she had a toy cat. Gave it to her daughter. My dear dear Susan. Susan travelled with me, you know? We arrived in the Blitz, mid twentieth century Earth. Dreadful bombing. Gave it to a girl whose home had been bombed, mother killed. I was proud of my little Susan that day.”

“And your youngest?”

His face darkened again. “A mistake. To weave a child on a loom to save a marriage. Always in competition. I gave her a dog, a huge floppy dog toy brought from Earth. Not rabbit or car or bear for her. He then and went to fetch a genuine Earth teddy bear. She was still sleeping with both when I left, and she was older than you... Perhaps I should have taken her with me as well as Susan?

“No, perhaps not. In some aspects she was as unstable as her other father. Not in dangerous ways. I do regret what I did for her. There is an Earth poem...”

“What Doctor?”

“H’m?” He obviously had forgotten she was there. He pulled himself together again and grinned. “Nothing.”

“Did you not look them up Doctor, while on Gallifrey?”

“What good would that do? They’re best left without their old renegade father, wouldn’t you say?” He closed the door. “Now, I was giving you a tour.”

And the voices faded away as they walked away. I slept again. Perhaps, again, for centuries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not happy with the voice of the Fourth Doctor, but then, as my excuse, we have never heard him talk about personal matters.


	6. Nyssa

The Doctor had regenerated again when next my door was opened, but he hadn’t been long in this new body. She had touched me with her concern a little while before. Something to do again with her Thief’s husband, the Evil One. He looked younger than he ever had, with floppy blond hair, dressed as if he were about to walk on to the cricket pitch. He smiled a shy, lop-sided smile and picked me up.

“I have a job for you to do Hi-Fi. You did such a good job with Victoria, didn’t you? You might have your work cut out here, I’m not even sure if the Empire of Traken give their children soft toys. Well, they must, mustn’t they? I’ve not found a culture that doesn’t, however primitive or advanced, from bits of fur stitched together to made a mammoth or a carved wooden dolly to the rabbits, cats and bears of my own home, h’m? Well, come on, if you’re coming.” 

Of course I was coming, I was in his hand as he walked down the corridor. It was brighter, whiter, its lighting more diffused. He’d been decorating. Him or the TARDIS.

“Of course, in a way, it was more traumatic than for poor Victoria. That was Daleks –”

Daleks! I hate the Daleks!

“Not only did the Master kill Nyssa’s father, but he’s stolen his body, literally walking around inside Nyssa’s father’s body like a suit...”

Not only traumatic for Nyssa. I see that Doctor.

“Well, here we are.”

How did it take so long to walk from a cupboard one side of the console room door to a bedroom the other? You needed a little cuddle, didn’t you Doctor? Well, I am made to love, and for all the danger you put your companions in, I love you Doctor, with ever fibre, every bit of fluff and stuffing and fur of my being.

The Doctor knocked on the door. “Nyssa? May I come in?”

“Doctor! Oh, of course.”

We went in. A girl, about Victoria’s age when we first met, sat forlornly on the bed. None of Steven’s Picture-History could place her, but she looked like a fairy princess from the bedtime stories his parents read to him as a baby and toddler, when he first started school. She had cascades of dark curls and a pale face, dressed in brown velvet and layers of netting and tulle, sticking out under velvet over skirts, and sitting atop he curls a twisted metal crown. A forest fairy, perhaps? But her eyes, her eyes were so, so sad, even though it was obvious she was struggling to compose herself.

“How are you feeling?” the Doctor said gently as he sat down beside her.

“Well, I’m...”

“It’s all right to admit to the grief. You’ve been through so much, and been so brave and strong, staying so calm and in control for Tegan, helping me through my regenerative crisis the way you did. I am so grateful. And you’ve been so kind and gentle to Adric since we got him back. But now you must let us look after you, h’m?”

“Oh Doctor! It’s horrible. It was so horrible! It’s my father, and yet it isn’t. Not at all. I look at him and see pure evil shining from my father’s eyes. Is my father there at all?”

The Doctor put his hand gently on Nyssa’s shoulder and squeezed. This incarnation was obviously far less tactile that Victoria’s. “No. No, I’m sorry. Your father is... gone.”

“But how can I mourn him when that man... that evil man... And you Doctor!” Nyssa shrugged off the Doctor’s hand and turned to glare at him. “What exactly are your feelings for him? And he you? He killed you and yet on Castrovalva I saw... something! What is your history with him? You carry even more conflicted feelings than me. And so does he, mad and evil as he is.”

The Doctor took a deep breath. “He was my husband. A long, long time ago on Gallifrey. You are right, he is evil. He’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and a long time ago I ran, and I’ve kept on running...”

“Oh Doctor,” Nyssa said sadly. She put her hands on his and felt me. “What is this?”

“It’s a gift. He’s a gift. This is Hi-Fi. A soft toy from Earth. You have such things on Traken?”

“Of course, yes, but I’m a little old...”

“Not so old when we’re unhappy, eh? A long time ago he belonged to a wonderful young man who travelled with me. He left us to do amazing things. Then, one day, I took charge of a poor orphaned girl; her father had been killed fighting true evil, by Daleks. I gave Hi-Fi to her.”

“I’ve heard of Daleks, of course. I suppose I am a poor orphaned girl. I hope one day I can leave you to make you proud. But what is he?”

“Who? Hi-Fi? He’s a panda, an animal from Earth, and a gentle giant herbivore that eats one particular type of bamboo, native to a part of one of Earth’s continents. They are nearly extinct in Tegan’s time, human activity destroying their food source. Which reminds me, please don’t mention my history with the Master. Adric is too young to understand, although I have a horrible suspicion that he has had some garbled version from the Master. I must talk to him myself. Tegan is so volatile and the Master killed her aunt. Well, as you know. But more than that, humans, many humans, from Tegan’s era are prejudiced against same gender love and marriage.”

“How... odd. Some sentient people of all kinds are made that way, as are some higher mammals and lizards. The more I learn of humanity, the more they are unfathomable. I accept your gift Doctor. I did have a rag doll. Lutka. But my father felt I was too old. I put her away when I began to serve the Melkur, little knowing...” Nyssa broke off. The Doctor squeezed her shoulder again, then placed me on Nyssa’s lap, and left.

Nyssa held me up and studied me, then put me next to her, continuing to stare sadly, almost blank faced, at the bare walls. How could I love and nurture someone so alien? I was made for a human child. Nyssa did not understand humans at all.

 

For a while Nyssa sat me on the nightstand beside her bed. Soon her room began to accumulate books and plenty of scientific instruments, test tubes and containers of chemicals. Although the human Tegan baffled her, she looked up to her like a big sister. Adric and she fell into a companionable teasing relationship of brother and sister. The Doctor in this version was prim and prissy, like a maiden aunt suddenly inheriting a brace of orphans she didn’t quite know what to do with, how to cope with – two highly gifted children and the mouthy, rebellious teenager.

After a while, Nyssa began to talk to me. She did id to think aloud, but it built a bond between us. She continued her biology, biochemistry and chemistry studies, and struggled to made sense of every adventure, every evil, every battle, and because she had such a bright, curious mind, she wanted to understand and know every planet, every species, every culture. She wanted to approach it all with dispassion and acceptance, for judgement was unscientific. But she found it so hard; she had grown up in a world with no poverty, no hatred, no prejudice, no crime. Perhaps, even, no passion. She wore her grief for her father on the inside, barely even showing it to me in a nightmare.

 

On day it was different. She entered the room, barely able to contain her sobs. She took me up from the nightstand and held me tightly, curling up into a tight ball into herself, weeping continually.

“Adric is dead!” she finally blurted out.

Oh no. Not Adric. I barely knew Katrina and Sara. But Adric, the boy who loved numbers, who sat on Nyssa’s bed and teased her about her experiments, pleading with her to be allowed to run her stats. Oh no...

I hugged back and loved her with all my might.

“Oh father,” she whispered when the tears had finally abated.

I loved her with all my stuffing. She had finally let out all the grief and pain she had kept behind a wall.

 

It seemed like very little time had passed from the death of Adric to when Nyssa once again flung herself on the bed after storming into her room. This time she was weeping in anger,

“He just abandoned her Hi-Fi! I know it was Heathrow, but we don’t know if it was exactly the right time, and if it wasn’t, then it would do Tegan no good at all. Besides, she had changed her mind, she wanted to stay now!”

Tegan had gone? Abandoned by the Doctor? I was sure he had had his reasons, but it did seem very odd, callous even, for the Doctor.

 

 

Time went on. Nyssa and the Doctor travelled alone, foster father and daughter, teacher and pupil, mentor and prodigy. Nyssa grew to maturity, both in character and in intelligence. She was a poised, confident young woman, knowing how to pilot the TARDIS, by the time the attack on the Doctor happened. I felt it because it upset the TARDIS enough to brush my tiny mind.

And then it was over. Another battle won. Another adventure over. And Tegan, older, but not necessarily wiser, was back in the TARDIS, like a breath of fresh air. Like the sun coming out, Nyssa had grown in that way too. I went from the nightstand to s shelf among the chemicals and books. From there I watched afresh first kisses, first love, the breath of new love, the gentle touches, affectionate giggles, Nyssa’s experimentation of a completely unscientific, irrational, entirely passionate, kind.

Then he arrived. I never met him. He never ventured into Nyssa’s room. I heard about him only from Nyssa’s and Tegan’s’ conversations. They hatred him. Not because the Doctor had found someone, but whom he had found, how bad he would be, how hurt the Doctor might become. That concern was reflected in the disquiet hum and disapproval deep in the heart of the TARDIS’s consciousness.

Turlough. Another Jamie. But as unlike Jamie as there could be without being the Master. But not quite like the Master. The Doctor, perhaps, had a track record of bad choices, but only Nyssa knew that and she always kept her promise, she did not share that with her lover and friend.

But I was just a stuffed panda. If the Doctor chose to steal the occasional hug while talking to Nyssa about biochemistry, then all I could do was love back with all my stuffing.


	7. Tegan

Soon after that boy had arrived, Nyssa left. Tegan came bursting into Nyssa’s room, mad and tearful and full of both sorrow and anger.

“She’s left Hi-Fi! She’s left us! She’s left ME!!!” and Tegan picked me up and hugged me tight, falling onto Nyssa’s bed and crying so violently I thought she might burst.

So I moved into Tegan’s room, the room that had been Steven’s so many centuries ago. It looked completely different. Just as Victoria washed out Steven’s odour from my fur, Tegan hugged and inhaled me until nothing of Nyssa remained but our memories.

Life was one battle for Tegan. She hated Turlough. She loved and hated and fancied the Doctor. Nyssa, she had been in love with. In the lulls between adventures, Tegan took herself off to the village pub, or the space dock or space station bar, the local tavern or countless pubs, clubs and bars in cities though out time and space, and drank herself to oblivion, then once drowned in drink she found a pretty boy or girl to drown in some more. Really Doctor, Tegan had no prejudice against same sex love, or even same sex casual encounters. Or opposite sex ones for that matter. But true, if she had known it was the Doctor’s husband who had killed her aunt, she might have never have forgiven him, and Tegan had forgiven the Doctor a lot – being abandoned, Adric’s death, Turlough’s very existence in the TARDIS, and in the Doctor’s bed, Nyssa’s noble departure.

And Nyssa’s departure had been noble and true and brave, just like Nyssa herself. Just like my Steven. To save people, to lead them, to make a people better.

Tegan’s departure was more like Dodo’s, a whimper rather than an explosion. Despite that there had been many explosions, many deaths, on Tegan’s last day.

I hate the Daleks.

For all her care and maturity compared with poor, young, naive Dodo, Tegan took her own temporal location and planet to leave to raise a baby.

Confused, sad and alone, the Doctor tidied me away back to my cupboard, apologizing, telling me in sad whispers that someone would need me again one day. In the meantime, he did not want Turlough to laugh.

This time the Daleks had made him so sad. Not angry or powerful or afraid. But sad.

I hate the Daleks.

We cuddled and had a long stare at each other before he closed the door.

Oh Doctor...


	8. So long alone

I slept for so long. Centuries upon centuries. Or remained in Doll State. Suspended animation. Whatever. Sometimes I was awake enough to hear people pass to and from the console room. And, of course, from time to time, she brushed my mind.

Turlough left the same day the Doctor watched his husband burn. He hurt. He hurt a lot. The TARDIS hummed worry for her Thief, although she did not mourn the passing of the Evil One or miss the departure of Turlough. She hated the new girl, especially after to save her the Doctor was forced into a regeneration, and unstable regeneration.

For this Doctor was unstable. More unstable, that is, than the Doctor had ever been. Mad. Bright. Loud. Volatile. Vulnerable. I think he had forgotten me. His companions too, came and went, some as mad as he, some not good for him... A penguin! That was, a shape shifter who preferred life as a penguin. What kind of Being chooses to live life as a sentient penguin? I loved the older woman, the kindly tone of her voice, and she filled the TARDIS with delicious smells of baking and chocolate. But she left, and then the bossy redhead came, and then the Time Lords again put him on trial, and any calm this persona of the Doctor had reached with Evelyn seemed to flee for good.

Centuries. Changes. He was small, but something huge and powerful, terrifying. Like his TARDIS, he was bigger on the inside. Perhaps all that happened later started with him? The great manipulator. Time’s Champion. He actively sought out evil, seeking it out, taking it on head on. Even the Daleks...

I hate Daleks.

But once,

“What’s this Professor? You had a teddy bear?”

“Hi-Fi!” he said happily. “Hello Hi-Fi. He belonged to a good friend of mine Ace. Once. And then, he has looked after two lonely girls, both bereaved, lonely girls, for me. I thought...”

“I’m not bloody lonely. Or bereaved. I hate my Mum! Get it?”

“Yes Ace,” he said sadly, “ I rather think I do Goodnight Hi-Fi,” and he closed the door.

There were changes. After battles with the Daleks, with others, a long life of many companions, adventures, he was gunned down. Then there was another version of his husband, the Master stealing another body to wear, this time a human. The Doctor was young again, handsome, a romantic hero with long curling hair dressed in silk and velvet. The TARDIS ate the Master. She complained about it to me.

The girls and boys and adventures continued to come and go. No one opened the cupboard door.

I slept.


	9. The War

The Doctor had been in, fought in, prevented, started, wars many, many times. By accident. By design. For justice. For equality. For peace. But not like this. He had never considered himself a warrior, but a healer, healing the little people of the universe.

With a chosen, forced, regeneration shrouded in Gallifreyan religious mystery, he changed again, and he and the TARDIS answered the call.

Once, before Steven and I travelled with the Doctor, there had been Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, and then Romana – who taught the Doctor how to pilot his stolen TARDIS. Very occasionally, his husband, his best enemy, his nemesis, the Evil One, would step inside the TARDIS, once giving her indigestion. Now, many Time Lords, and other Gallifreyans, came and went. Soldiers, Capitol Guards, agents for the Celestial Intervention Agency, freedom fighters...

The War to end not just all wars, but all Time, all Space. The Time War between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Daleks of Skaro, its fronts spreading not across the galaxy but throughout the universe and beyond, its length, its breadth, height, depth, backwards, forwards, sideways, neverwhens and alsonows, encompassing all the befores and tomorrows, all the what ifs and maybes, its collateral damage not just whole races, civilizations and planets, but entire galaxies, entire epochs and entire fixed histories or futures of the entirety of Creation.

It was so huge, so big, the great and vast intelligence of the TARDIS consciousness could not comprehend it, what it meant, what it was doing, to that huge, vast, deep, incomprehensible Infinite of Time and Space. All of Creation could be wiped out, or wiped clean, Time constantly re-written. What hope could I, small, insignificant, tiny, stuffed toy, have in understanding any of it? How could I comfort that impossible entity of the TARDIS when she brushed my mind? She was one with the Doctor when he spoke the words aloud,

“No More.”


	10. The Ninth Doctor

The War was no more. The Doctor was changing, his regeneration more powerful, more bright, artron energy burned, washing backwards from the console room, touching me, renewing me, stitching re-did itself, my fur puffed up and clean, bright and dark, black and white again, stuffing plumped and full, glass eyes unscratched and clear.

Was it to do with what the Sisters of Sarn had done to him?

The cupboard door opened.

His hair was shorn, he was so tall, and broader, his Gallifreyan work clothes ripped by his new, bigger, body. As for his ears! Well! I have never seen such sticky out ears. The lack of hair didn’t help.

He didn’t speak, just took hold of me and hugged me. We went back into the console room, but he just sat on the floor and rocked.

He had decorated again. Many times, probably. It was dark, gothic, brooding. Gone were the back lit roundels and the odd, eclectic collection of furniture. I didn’t like it.

He sat there, just rocking backwards and forwards, for hours. Eventually he jumped up and we went into the wardrobe room. He sat me on a chair and threw on some new clothes. Very un-Doctory clothes. A dark jersey, a leather jacket, all very brooding and emo. He avoided, I noticed, the mirrors.

Then we went to the kitchen and he sat under the table, still hugging me tightly, rocking. This went on for hours, until the tears came, rolling down his cheeks, splashing onto his hands and my fur.

“I must do something!” he said eventually, maybe after a day. He crawled out, stiff and tired, and sat me on the kitchen table while he made himself a pot of tea and some toast. Once he had a cup and a plate in front of him, he sat at the table with me on his lap.

“The War has ended Hi-Fi.”

Good.

“I ended it.”

How? You are brave Doctor, fearless, the Daleks fear you, Destroyer of Worlds, but...?

“I let it all burn. The Daleks. Gallifrey. I had to. To save the Universe. Gallifrey... my people... the children...”

Oh! Oh? Oh. Oh Doctor, I love you with all my fur and stuffing, but I cannot comfort you, I don’t think anyone can.

Ever.


	11. Rose

That very day the TARDIS found the Doctor a distraction: Autons. And very soon a new companion joined him at the kitchen table, where he had left me, days before.

“Oh! Who’s this?”

She had cascades of blonde hair and a wide smiling mouth full of too many teeth. Her friendly blue eyes were smiling too.

“Hi-Fi. He belonged to a friend a long, long time ago. Steven. I suppose I should put him back in his cupboard.”

“Where’s that Doctor?”

“By the console room door.”

“Have you been giving him a little secret cuddle?”

“No. Of course not!”

“Oh Doctor! This War, it was very recent for you, wasn’t it? Like, just before we met.”

“No. Well, Yeah. Sort of.”

“And you needed a cuddle.”

This new dark, hard, Doctor shrugged his leather-clad shoulders and looked down. “Might of.”

And this new companion did something no companion I’d ever seen before do, except perhaps Jamie, and he was so much more than a companion. She put both her arms around him, pulled his head down onto her shoulder and stroked his newly razored hair.

“Never be afraid to ask for a hug Doctor. I’m here now, okay?” She touched his chin and grinned. “All right?”

“Yes. Fine. Thanks.” And he hugged back, tightly.

After al while, they pulled apart. “Thank you,” the Doctor said quietly.

“No problem. Don’t ask, don’t get,” the new girl said, smiling her warm, infectious, beautiful smile. “Now, you said something about making me a cup of tea?”

While he Doctor busied himself with kettle, tea caddy and pot, the girl picked me up and placed me on a high shelf, in-between a fifth century BC vase from China and a twenty-fifth century pewter coffee pot from the mines of Mars. “There,” she said. “Hi-Fi can live there now. No more cupboards for such a fine little panda. Then, if I’m not around for cuddles, he’s not far away.”


	12. Companions come, companions go

So, life continued as if had before the Time War, the Doctor fighting evil, righting wrongs, saving planets and people. The same but different. Always darkness, sadness, like a new power, burned within the Doctor. Meanwhile, the TARDIS hummed a back ground hum of confusion and worry that some how the universe had shrunk down small, that the war had taken vast chunks of infinity, leaving a small rump behind. But how can you take away from infinity. Even I, from Steven’s maths revision read out loud to me, know that!

But life continued, adventures, and companions, came and went.

First, another man joined Rose and the Doctor. I did not like him, despite how he reminded me of Steven at some angles, in some lights. He was too arrogant, fancied himself too much. And he joined both the Doctor and Rose in their beds. Rose, he amused, as if the one night stand had got him out of her system. The Doctor grew clingy and brooding. This man obviously had many others out of the TARDIS, which the Doctor did not like at all. There was many an awkward silence at the breakfast table, many a row over tea once they returned to the TARDIS following yet another adventure.

Then the Daleks arrived. The TARDIS was so mad. And afraid. The Doctor had destroyed the Daleks along with the Time Lords, but the Daleks refused to stay dead.

I hate the Daleks.

These Daleks, these human-Daleks, killed Jack, killed them all. I never liked Jack, but when the TARDIS told me what she saw from the Vortex...

The Doctor expected to lose. He no longer knew how to defeat the Daleks. He was afraid. He was prepared to sacrifice Jack, and to die himself, but he sent Rose and the TARDIS to safety. Neither liked the idea. Rose was locked out and the TARDIS, he had shut her partially down. She was furious. She screamed in my head for a saviour called

Bad Wolf.

Rose came, ripping open the doors, looking into the Heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS let her into the heart of her consciousness, they were one, the very power of the Vortex, the burning light of artron energy at the Heart or the Eye of Harmony, washed the whole TARDIS, bathing me in the kitchen as much as all of Time and Space, as it consumed Rose’s mind and soul...

I Bring Life!

And Jack lived. But the Daleks were no more, wiped once more from the face of all creation. Yet, I doubt it. Somehow, the evil always remains...

I hate the Daleks.

The Doctor died. He regenerated. He became beautiful. Once, he had been young and blond, a floppy haired, affable appearance hiding his age and power. Then he had been the Byronic romantic hero, young, longhaired and Victorian in silk and velvet. But now he was young and beautiful, and a little bit sexy.

I don’t think Rose liked it to start with. She mourned for her Doctor. It was not helped by his post-regenerative crisis. Not as severe as the other one, but enough to knock him flat.

Normality reasserted itself. The Doctor and Rose enjoyed the danger far too much for my liking. As if the Doctor, damaged and vulnerable, became manic and hyper, addicted to putting himself in harms way, getting high on risk and threat, and was dragging Rose down this path of dangerous addiction, of toxic need.

Then another new boy arrived. I liked him. He was Rose’s. He was dark skinned, attractive, kind, clever and brave, but he didn’t seem to know any of those things. He also, when he asked after me, asked about Steven. And while Rose slept the Doctor sat down at the kitchen table and told Mickey it all; The City, the Mechonoids and the Daleks, the Meddling Monk, Vicki, Dodo, Katrina and Sara, and the Savages and Elders. He even talked of Steven’s time, of what like would have been like for him in a Hive Block and in Space Fleet. As he did so I felt heaviness within me as if all my hollow fibre stuffing had turned to lead. I ached for him, for my Steven, or for peace.

Sadly, one day Rose came into the kitchen and picked me up and held me while tears rolled down her beautiful cheeks. It was about a day after the TARDIS had actually shut down. I had been so afraid, alone in the dark, terrified that the TARDIS, and the Doctor, had died...

Mickey was gone. Left behind, never to return, in another universe entirely....

The travels continued until once again there were Daleks. Real, Skaronian, Kaled descended Daleks, not imitation human-DNA impure replacements. They emerged from the No-When, No-Where, No-Place Prison – forgive me, I do not understand the TARDIS at times, well often – and ripped Rose from the universe!

I would have preferred it if the Doctor had sat under the table and rocked again. But this one grew ever more manic, more dangerous, more addicted to risk, more powerful, more hyper, more beautiful even...

A new girl. Martha. Dark skinned, pretty, a student doctor, brave and clever. Yet, I could not like her. Her schoolgirl crush was painful to watch every time they sat together at the kitchen table.

New Jack returned, magic Jack, impossible Jack. He made the TARDIS sick. Then, almost immediately, the Evil One was back. The Doctor’s husband, her Thief’s Master, stealing her without her permission.

Then she was screaming. Screaming and screaming in my head. Reaching for some small comfort, reaching out to the smallest, insignificant levels of consciousness within her, be it a stuffed toy or a flock of birds or colony of bats within her being. She was screaming, screaming, screaming, in pain, terrified, as if, in her metaphorical hands she held in one the last dregs of humanity at the end of all Time, dying in the dark and on the contradictory hand, these un-human, inhuman monsters travelling back in time to kill and conquer and control their ancestors so that a New Gallifrey might rise. It hurt. It hurt her so much. She screamed and screamed and screamed and I could do nothing, providing what little comfort I could was like baling out an ocean with a teaspoon.

I am here. I love you. The Doctor will save you.

The Doctor is in a cage. He has had his power and vitality stripped. One pet is being constantly tortured, the other has fled.

The Doctor will save you!

It hurts. Make it stop. I cannot hold the contradiction. It is evil. It is wrong. It hurts!

And she screamed and screamed and screamed.

But I was right. He did save her. He saved humanity, Earth and the Universe. Time righted itself; so much as it could following the Time War. That had broken Time so much; the Doctor had fractured time in a Moment...

This manic, hyper Doctor finally stopped. He had been defeated, even in victory; he had been defeated, if only for a year that never was. His companions chose to leave him and he thought he knew why. He conducted the funeral rights of his husband alone, the Evil One, his nemesis, his best enemy. He had humbled himself in front of his companions, other humans and it tipped him from mania to depression. After all, what saviour and hero falls to his knees before the evil and pleads to be taken back, to be loved, to be a dutiful husband again. An abused spouse begging for more, forgiving all, because he loved him and needed him. 

This revelation of the Doctor shocked him to the core. So there was only one thing this Doctor could do; forget it, bury it, lock it in a box in the back of his mind, shrug of the sadness and depression and bounce into facing danger and distract himself with a false, bright happiness that was brittle and use the adventures as his drug.

Another new girl. Woman. Red of hair, fierce and independent in nature, a friend not a foster daughter or embarrassing groupie with a crush. They worked together as a team, almost as equals. Like Romana. Only Sarah-Jane, Ace, Benny and Rose had been the only humans to ever come close before.

Daleks. Again. They just wouldn’t stay obliterated.

I hate Daleks.

Did this mean, somewhere, somewhen, Time Lords still existed, lost down a crack in Time?

The Daleks plans seemed to get bigger and more ambitious every time the Doctor encountered them. Rose managed to tear down the barriers between the universes to save her Doctor, and yet she failed. The Daleks killed the Doctor! The Daleks shot him. The TARDIS screamed it in my mind, it happened just in front of her, in clear scanner range.

The Daleks killed the Doctor!

I hate the Daleks.

They carried him back, Rose, Jack, Donna and Sarah Jane. And he regenerated. And yet, he did not. Rather, he kept the same body. He so loves being beautiful, sexy and loved. He adores the attention.

But I did not, and do not, understand what happened later, after the Daleks defeated, and all companions returned home.

Donna was dying, and she was pleading with the Doctor to let her go, to be allowed to die. But to save her, he went against her wishes. The Doctor stole her memories. The doors between the console room and the kitchen, which that week was right next to the console room, so I heard it all.

Oh Doctor, how could you do such a thing to a friend you loved? When you knew how it hurts, when the Time Lords did that to your beloved Jamie and your friend Zoe? How? You know how it hurts.

Poor Donna.


	13. Steven

He travels now alone. He spends more and more time brooding, dark, still, the mania and the adventures, the risk and danger, happen less and less.

Once I think there are more than one incarnation within the TARDIS. I think I see the Warrior-Doctor at the kitchen table, along with one I do not know, a Future-Doctor, the ancient one who looks like a child.

Perhaps it was a dream? The TARDIS does not explain. Normally, I only dream of Steven’s childhood and our time trapped in The City by the Mechonoids. Sometimes too of Victoria or Nyssa.

One day there is an adventure so big, another one so huge and scary involving his unstoppable, unkillable, mad husband. I feel the TARDIS’s contempt and hatred.

Then there are frantic movements. In and out of the Vortex, materializing and dematerializing, sometimes only minutes apart. After many of these short hops the Doctor enters the kitchen.

“Hello Hi-Fi.”

Hello Doctor.

“I’m dying. Again. Radiation.”

Oh Doctor. It killed you before, a long time ago. And Romana. It took so long for both of you to die, you were both in so much pain, they were such unpleasant regenerations.

“I don’t want to go Hi-Fi.”

No.

“But I want to see all those I’ve loved before I go, and there is something I can do for you, put right for you.”

?

“I know you crave peace. We all do. Listen to me, you’re just a stuffed toy, a child’s comforter, but you deserve peace. No forget that, Hi-Fi, there is no only about anyone. Of course you deserve peace.”

He picks me up and carries me to the console room. There he sets the coordinates. In minutes we’ve arrived and he takes me out through the doors.

Now, I know all the new ones exclaim how it is ‘bigger on the inside’. I remember vaguely seeing a blue door from Steven’s hand, but nothing more. One the outside, the TARDIS is a small wooden blue rectangular box. So small on the outside, so tiny.

We are in a dimly lit room. A bedroom. There is the scent of roses, covering the smells of sickness, disinfectant and death. And old man lies in a bed, a young woman sits in a chair beside him.

“Who are you?” she asks, standing.

“I’m the Doctor.”

“I’ve heard of you. I thought I did recognize the TARDIS from Father’s stories. I should be scared, but I’m not.”

“I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“Of course.”

The Doctor walks to the bed and I see... Steven! My Steven! His hair is snow white, he is so old, and his breathing is so shallow. The Doctor bends and kisses Steven gently on the forehead, like a father kissing a child goodnight,

“Sleep well my dear Steven. I am so proud of you,” and for a moment his voice is that of Steven’s Doctor, of the Doctor’s loom-body. Then he tucks me up next to Steven in the bed.

“This is Hi-Fi. He belonged to your Father when he was a child. Please make sure the panda is buried with Steven.”

“As you wish Doctor. I have heard so many things about you. I expected you to be older.”

“Ooh. I am old. So very, very old now.”

“Yes,” she says, like she can really see it and understands.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Dodo.”

“Dodo! Dodo! What a brilliant name.”

“Thank you. What should I say? If Father should wake?”

“Tell him the Doctor said goodbye. And that I am proud of him. Yes, I am proud of him,” and again he voice sounds like the First Doctor, Steven’s Doctor. Then he turns and walks back into the TARDIS and, with the sound of wheezing and groaning I have never heard on the outside, the TARDIS fades back into the Vortex, taking the Doctor with her.

My Steven stirs.

“The TARDIS. I heard the TARDIS?” His voice is so weak.

“Yes Father. The Doctor came to say goodbye. He wanted to tell you he was proud of you.”

“What’s this...? Hi-Fi!” He lifts me and stares with love into my glassy eyes, and behind the rheumy, ancient, dying eyes I see the excited eyes of a one-year-old baby boy falling in love with me. “My Hi-Fi.” He clutches m to him and closes his eyes, pressing me against his chest. Then, suddenly, he lets his breath out, a slow, long death rattle and I... for me, things are blurring, darkening, I can’t hear anything anymore... I want peace. Will I...? Steven and I together. I fall as Steven’s chest falls and then

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for any typos or errors, this is unbetaed and rushed!


End file.
